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This week our podcast guest is Angelika Morini (Do You See Me Now?, indie published, February 2025). Angelika, who lives and writes from Germany, discusses the challenges of querying publishing professionals from overseas. We delve into how a short story kept growing until she realized she was writing a book, how her plot (two sisters at a retreat to study The Hero's Journey) provided a structure for her book as well, and how it wasn't until she'd published her debut that she realized book marketing was another (almost) full-time job.
 
Angelika Morini was born in Eastern Germany in the 1980s and chose to alchemize her own lived experience as the historical background of her debut novel Do You See Me Now?. She writes in English, the language of her emotions, thoughts, and dreams, ever since she studied in the United States, in Minnesota and Washington State. Since then, most of her life has happened in English, including her professional and family life. By profession Morini is a senior HR leader, ICF certified Coach and certified Conscious Parenting Coach through Dr. Shefali Tsabary's institute, which informs the psychological texture of her fiction. She lives in Germany with her husband, son and well-traveled cat, enjoying regular visits of her two adult bonus-children. She frequently spends time at the Lago Maggiore in Italy, her energetic home and setting of the second novel she's currently writing.
 
To learn more about Angelika and her novel, click here.

Our podcast guest this week is Jen Sinclair (There's Always A Price, indie-published, September 2024). We talk about her early love of writing (her first book, a police procedural with a twist, was written in 8th grade), how she handled revising this debut to give her protagonist more agency through a structural change and how she's a believer in always needing to be open to changing your story based on feedback. We delve at length into Facebook ads which has proved successful for her, and also discuss her habit of having several quick drafts of novels waiting in the wings.
Jen Sinclair is a professional writer who pens personal essays and contemporary women's fiction that explore complicated relationships, love, loss, and all the messiness of life. She uses humor, heart, and compelling plot elements to explore what it means to be human. Her first two novels, There's Always a Price and According to My Science placed second and third for best women's fiction at The Florida Writers Association 2025 Royal Palm Literary Awards. They were both also named Best Books of Fall 2025 by Pencraft, and According to My Science was a semi-finalist in the BookLife 2025 Fiction contest. She also collaborated on the dark friendship fiction novel, The Accidental Life of MF Ascher under the pen name Ivy H. Booker. Jen lives in Florida with her kids and spoiled puppies.
To learn more about Jen, click here.

This week our podcast guest is Kim Gottlieb-Walker (Lenswoman in Love – a Novel of the 1960's and '70's, indie published, February 2025). Kim shares the complete re-writes she did on her debut based on critique group feedback, why she calls herself a patchwork writer, and the story behind the support group of women writers over 70 which she founded. We discuss her life as a photographer in Hollywood, shooting such celebrities as Bob Marley, Pink Floyd, and Joni Mitchell, and how a story of her encounter with Jimi Hendrix made her teenage daughter realize her mom had once been a "babe."
 
Kim Gottlieb-Walker's fifty-year career as a photographer covered a wide range of subjects, from classic rock and roll, reggae, and politics in the '60s and '70s to major motion pictures and television shows. She began her career shooting for underground LA newspapers and magazines including Crawdaddy, the Staff, and Music World. She also shot the stills for John Carpenter's Halloween, The Fog, Christine and Escape from New York and worked at Paramount Pictures as the production photographer for Cheers and for Family Ties. She also served as the representative for still photographers on the National Executive Board of IATSE Local 600, the International Cinematographers Guild.
Her coffee-table photo books Bob Marley and the Golden Age of Reggae and On Set with John Carpenter were published by Titan Press (UK) distributed by Random House (USA) and both are now in multiple printing and she's had gallery shows in London, Los Angeles and New York.
LENSWOMAN IN LOVE - a novel of the 1960s & '70s  won over a dozen literary awards including Best Debut and Novel of the Year. Photos that informed her debut novel can be found on Substack. To learn more about Kim, click here to go to her website.
Women authors over 70 looking for a feisty, smart, supportive weekly zoom chat - contact Kim at Kim@Largedoor.com with Vintage Writers in the heading.

Our podcast guest this week is Barbara Burton (A Walk Down Rushville, Manuscripts Press, April 2024). Barbara, a lover of true crime series, has a unique publishing experience to share. She signed with her press before completing her novel and they put her through a 6-month rigorous deep dive into craft first with strict completion deadlines, write-in Zoom meetings with a cohort, and detailed exercises in character development, plotting, dialogue, and setting. She shares her best advice to new writers and describes why consulting experts is non-negotiable.
 
Barbara is a former Capitol Hill reporter and registered nurse. For the past 25 years, she's worked in management consulting helping companies with strategic visioning, marketing, cultural alignment, communication and sustainability. She's the author of two illustrated, sing-along children's books, the most recent, published in 2022, is titled Annie Kai Lani Kai Lou: Maui's Beloved Pup. She also is a soft jazz vocalist. She created the song and sings vocals for the children's books and has recorded two CDs.She lives in La Jolla with her husband and two Springer Spaniels. To learn more about her, click here. 
Barbara was inspired to write a novel about how individuals "create" a family when they have no family of origin, having experienced some loss of family in her own life. In the novel, her protagonist finds self-fulfillment and creates a nonprofit organization that encourages neighbors to reach out to others in their neighborhood and create an extended family. Barbara decided to make the organization real and it is now a registered nonprofit in the state of California. www.neighborsasfamily.org.

This Special Edition podcast features long-time WFWA member Julie Carrick Dalton (The Forest Becomes Her, St. Martin's Press, July 2026) who has just published her third book with a Big Five publisher with another one due in 2028. Rather than focus on her publishing journey, we dive deep into the writing process itself, including finding your "why", emotional mining your own psyche for true emotional resonance, and how to turn a passion (in Julie's case, climate activism) into a framing network for your writing career. So much meaty discussion here, including why you might want your book to rate lower on GoodReads, exploring the different stages in women's lives, and the power of chiastic storytelling, a novel where the end circles back to the beginning.
 
Julie Carrick Dalton is the author of The Forest Becomes Her, The Last Beekeeper, and Waiting for the Night Song. Her work has won the New Hampshire Book Awards' People's Choice Award for Best Novel and been named a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award, the Siskiyou Prize for New Environmental Literature, and others. Her novels have appeared on most-anticipated lists from CNN, Newsweek, USA Today, and Parade, among others. A former journalist, organic farmer, and beekeeper, she is a TEDx and keynote speaker who frequently speaks about fiction in the age of climate crisis at universities, museums, and conferences in the United States and abroad. She teaches in Drexel University's Creative Writing MFA program, is a 2026–27 Visiting Scholar of Note at the American Library of Paris, and is a frequent guest lecturer at Harvard.
To learn more about Julie, click here.